Council delays Children's Pool closure

On Tuesday, a group of tourists descended on the beach to see the seals at the Children's Pool beach in La Jolla. The San Diego City Council postponed a vote on a seasonal closure of the beach to address revisions requested by the California Coastal Commission, which must also approve the closure.
— Peggy Peattie

On Tuesday, a group of tourists descended on the beach to see the seals at the Children's Pool beach in La Jolla. The San Diego City Council postponed a vote on a seasonal closure of the beach to address revisions requested by the California Coastal Commission, which must also approve the closure.
— Peggy Peattie

The San Diego City Council delayed action on a seasonal closure of Children’s Pool in La Jolla, after Coastal Commission staff stated in a letter that they would not support the particular protection the city planned to invoke.

Instead the city plans to consider the measure in January, after addressing the commission’s suggested revisions.

The council was scheduled to decide Tuesday whether to close the beach at Children’s Pool from Dec. 15 to May 15 each year during pupping season and declare it an environmentally sensitive habitat area.

In a letter to the council, however, Coastal Commission program analyst Kanani Brown said that designation would bar nearly all public access to the beach – a position the commission wouldn’t support.

Instead, Brown stated, the beach could be listed under a separate section of the California Coastal Act that grants special protection to “areas and species of special biological or economic significance.”

That designation, she wrote, would better address the seal rookery and allow broader public access outside of pupping season.

Children’s pool, constructed in 1931 to allow safe ocean access to local children, has been the subject of bitter controversy since seals began congregating at the site since the 1990s. While some residents sought protect the site for seals, others argued that humans and animals could share the beach.

Tuesday’s postponement left both sides claiming partial victory.

On its website, the pro-access group Friends of Children’s Pool lauded the commission for steering San Diego away from declaring the site an environmentally sensitive habitat area.

“This is not the clean magic bullet the City seeks to steal a beach from its citizens” the website stated.

Officials with Friends of the Seals, however, said the delay allows the city to fine-tune its beach closure ordinance to meet the commission’s specifications.

“They’re aligned on the goal” executive director Adrian Kwiatkowski told several dozen seal supporters. “We have to align them on the mechanism.”

Members worried that the city would not revisit the issue until January, a month after the proposed start of the closure, and well into pupping season.

But Kwiatkowski said they would seek emergency measures to shut the beach before then.